Best way to restrain the people in power

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Independence Day is an occasion to pay homage to the deities of America's civic religion. Some names will leap to the forefront of the mind quicker than others. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, for instance, make just about everybody's short list. So too does Benjamin Franklin, who earned himself a permanent place in the nation's heart by representing a uniquely American synthesis of the rakish and the avuncular.

There are others whose celebrity isn't quite proportionate to their accomplishments. James Madison, perhaps the greatest philosopher of practical politics the nation has ever produced, rarely gets top billing. Thanks to the intercessory graces of HBO – the tail that wags the cultural dog – John Adams has enjoyed a bit of a resurgence of late, yet still remains underappreciated. Thomas Paine – who, were he alive today, would be an extremely successful talk radio host – also gets overlooked with regularity.

All of these men are worth celebrating on Independence Day, but no American worth his salt ought to let the calendar turn to July 5 without remembering yet another unsung hero of the nation's conception; a man who, it should be noted, died more than 2,000 years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus was a Roman statesman of the 5th century B.C. According to the historian Livy, he had retired to a life of farming after his tenure as consul, but was summoned back to service by the Senate as a panicked Rome attempted to stave off invasion.

Cincinnatus was granted dictatorial power for six months. In one of history's great displays of civic virtue, he repulsed the invasion and then, having completed the objective of his appointment, voluntarily surrendered power after barely two weeks and returned to life on his farm.

It's something of a tragedy that the world knows the name of Julius Caesar – a man who, in life, never relinquished authority intended to be temporary – yet Cincinnatus remains largely forgotten.

He was not obscure, however, to George Washington, whose emulation of Cincinnatus was essential to creating a free nation. Like the ancient Roman, Washington was called out of his bucolic life on the farm to lead the Continental Army's efforts against the British. At the war's successful conclusion, Washington's status as a national icon was so singular that he could have easily attempted to become an American Caesar. Instead, following Cincinnatus's example, he handed over his sword and returned to his fields.

When told of Washington's plan, England's King George III remarked, “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.”

Washington would replicate this demonstration of republican virtue 13 years later, when he voluntarily left the White House after two terms as president (there were no term limits on presidents until the adoption of the 22nd Amendment in 1951, itself a reaction to the four terms of that anti-Cincinnatus, Franklin D. Roosevelt). Twice in his career, Washington had demonstrated the same principle: part of the responsible discharge of power in a republic is being willing – eager, in fact – to give it up.

Today, when there is a widespread suspicion that our governing class is possessed of a Gollum-like obsession with power, there are occasional efforts to restrain that ambition through institutional mechanisms such as term limits. Those initiatives rarely go according to plan. The average term-limited politician is more likely to take a lobbying job or begin coveting another elected office than he is to return to the farm. The law, it turns out, can be an effective mechanism for restraining man's worst impulses, but it can do little to create virtue.

That is a lesson that Americans hoping to continue the tradition of freedom should take to heart. It is a good and necessary impulse to restrain those in power. It's a much better one, however, to choose for such positions those who are willing to restrain themselves.

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